MUCH LESS the World Series. Yet magically, miraculously, incredibly, that is exactly where the Red Sox found themselves in mid-October. Up in Vermont, over coffee at the Common Hotel early on the morning that Moon made it official by putting up on the Green Monster the words SOX TAKE SEVENTH GAME FROM TWINS, WIN PENENT, Judge Charlie Kinneson told his brother the editor and Prof Benton and the elderly bat boys that yes, Boston was on the most remarkable roll he could remember. But the preponderance of the evidence led him to only one conclusion: no team in baseball was going to win four of seven games from Boston’s opponent in the Series that fall, the New York Mets. The Mets, who had taken three of four games from the Sox back in early July during interleague play, were loaded with talent and depth. For starters, they had the best pitcher in baseball, Mario “Pancho” Villa. In addition, they had two other twenty-game winners on their pitching staff, the fearsome Japanese submarine pitcher, Suzika Koyoto, and the fastest pitcher in the National League, Doc Sweetwater Jones, who consistently threw 98 mph and patterned himself on Sal “the Barber” Maglie, throwing on the fists, grazing the hitter’s chin, knocking his knees out from under him, and then, when he moved off the plate, spotting the ball on the outside corner where he couldn’t have reached it with a mop handle. And they had a tall, pinch-faced long-ball hitter and Gold Glove first baseman named Miller Jacks.
Jacks had played briefly for the Sox six years before. Spence had personally run him off the field during a night game with the Orioles in Camden Yards for not hustling out a comebacker to the pitcher. Jacks had just stood at the plate, disgusted, while the pitcher threw him out, and Spence had flown out of the dugout and grabbed him by the neck and the seat of his uniform pants and charged into the tunnel with him, hurling him into the dressing room and trading him to New York the next morning. The old man had backed Spence one hundred percent, even paying the manager’s hefty league fine for attacking one of his own players. Afterward, as they watched the tape of Spence giving Miller Jacks the bum’s rush in front of fifty thousand delighted Baltimore fans, the old man repeatedly pumped Spence’s hand and said it was his finest moment in baseball. As far as Spence was concerned, not running out a ground ball was a cardinal sin, tantamount to, say, badmouthing Willie Nelson. Though it was about what he’d expect from a fella who had a last name for a first name and a first name, or something close to it, for a last name. Spence was greatly looking forward to taking Jacks and the Mets to school in the Series and then cashing in his baseball career forever and going fishing.
Late on the Friday night before the opening game of the Series, E.A., who since his debacle against the Yankees had been relegated to throwing BP again, lay in bed in his hotel room listening to Sally snore and thinking about baseball. How he’d run on the village green in the evenings to build up his legs when he was just a tyke. Gotten the game-winning hit off the four-eyed schoolteacher in the championship game against Pond in the Sky. And thrown all those no-hitters against the Outlaws’ rivals. Sometimes in the late innings, when a game was in the bag, he’d pitched like Dazzy Vance of the old Brooklyn Dodgers, tipping way back and shutting his eyes and hiding the ball behind his leg so it seemed to come at the hitter out of deep center field. Or like Walter Johnson, who came from the side faster than anyone but Feller had ever come over the top. He could kick his leg higher than Juan Marichal, spin around like the great El Tiante, and throw an eephus pitch like Rip Sewell’s or the Alien’s, up, up, and up, then right down over the plate, a perfect strike, while the batter watched with his mouth open. And that’s when the inspiration came to him.
“I ain’t about to be badgered, not today of all days,” Spence told E.A. the next morning, just before the Sox were set to take the field for BP. “If you’re here to badger me about pitching, kid, we’ve been over all that before. Like I said, you’ve got a future with the game. But not this year. You need a season at Bristol, then one at Providence, working on getting that fourth pitch. Now skedaddle. I got to get the boys ready for that underhanded pitcher going against us.”
“I can help with that.”
“You’re a hitting coach now?” Spence said.
“No,” E.A. said. “But I can pitch BP just like Koyoto.”
Spence’s face turned the shade of a cooked lobster. Just before he blew, E.A. said, “Watch and see for yourself.”
Then he left, fast, before something really unfortunate happened.
E.A. told the groundskeepers he’d throw BP off the mound that morning, and he asked them to roll the batting cage up to home plate. As Sally stood in to take his raps, E.A. stepped toward third base, swung his arm in an arc with his fingers nearly brushing the dirt and his arm sweeping underhanded across his body so that the pitch appeared to shoot up toward the plate from out of the grass somewhere between the mound and third. Sally was so surprised that he let the ball go by, belt-high over the heart of the plate. Then he grinned and slammed the next one and the next one and the next one deep into the outfield gaps.
From the stands, a few early arrivers, members of the Fenway posse, called out something about woodchucks. E.A. thought of Gran, smiled, and pitched like Koyoto, duplicating the swinging arm and wicked sidewinding upshoot, and when the game started the Sox hitters jumped all over Koyoto and sent him to the showers in the top of the third inning.
SOX TAKE SERIES OPENER AT FENWAY 10–4 BEHIND ALIAN MAN, read the sign on the bat mill in Kingdom Common early the following morning.
“No small thanks to our boy,” Earl No Pearl was saying over his first cup of coffee at the hotel. “According to the Voice of the Sox, yesterday old E.A. give the boys BP just like that Jap fella. I imagine he’ll do it again today. Only it’ll be Sweetwater, not Koyoto.”
“E.A. can do Sweetwater?’’Judge Charlie K said.
“Hell, yes, he can do Sweetwater,” Earl said. “Here down to Woodsville one afternoon a year ago, E.A. thrown like Doc Sweetwater for two, three innings. Them New Hampshire boys couldn’t touch him.”
Sweetwater Jones stood six feet eight inches tall and weighed two hundred and fifty-five pounds. Besides leading Arkansas to a Division One National Championship in the College Baseball World Series, he’d caught more TD passes than any other player in the Razorbacks’ history. He threw 98, 99, and occasionally 100 mph, coming straight over the top, with a peculiar hitch at the apex that disconcerted opposing hitters nearly as much as the fact that in the off-season he practiced dental surgery in Little Rock. Something about a dental surgeon who could make the ball sing like a high-powered dental drill as it hurded toward the plate scared the daylights out of hitters. In his four seasons with the White Sox before going over to the Mets two years before, Doc Sweetwater had lost to Boston only once.
E.A. naturally came straight over the top himself, and he’d practiced Doc Sweetwater’s idiosyncratic hitch, which was actually a very calculated hesitation—analogous, perhaps, to checking to be sure that the drill bit was positioned exactly where he wanted it before ratcheting it up to full bore. BP pitchers had tried, unsuccessfully, to mimic Sweetwater’s hitch before, but E.A. had him down perfectly, and on the last six or eight pitches of each hitter’s raps, he threw his 21st-Century Limited to help them fine-tune their timing.
Sweetwater’s change was only moderately effective—he had never mastered the technique of maintaining the same arm speed that he used for his fastball—and the second game of the World Series began with the Sox leadoff hitter taking the former Razorback’s first pitch high over the Green Monster. For Boston the game got better and better. In the meantime E.A. fumed silently in the dugout. He’d helped the Sox get their 3–0, 6–2, and 8–3 leads and their 8–5 win. Yet he still hadn’t thrown a single pitch in a post-season game.
For the third game, in Shea Stadium, the Mets had saved their best pitcher, who had pitched the first, fourth, and part of the seventh game in their National League championship series against Atlanta. All-Star Mario “Pancho” Vila was the most unorthodox pitcher in major-league baseball. During the regular season he had compiled a record of 32–4.
Villa hailed from Mexico City and had grown up watching tapes of Luis Tiant and Fernando Valenzuela. Like Tiant, he spun around and looked at the center-field wall, tipping his chin skyward, leaning back nearly parallel to the ground, throwing his glove straight up and his left elbow out toward the batter and releasing his humming fastballs and sinking off-speed deliveries (it was said he had eight distinct breaking pitches) from no one knew exactly where. His release point was one of the great mysteries of baseball.
Pancho Villa, E.A. discovered, was difficult to imitate. He seemed to be part baseball pitcher and part prima ballerina, but that wasn’t the tough part. The tough part was that he was also part illusionist. At some point during the Mexican hurler’s serpentine gyrations, the hitter lost track not just of the baseball but of Villa’s throwing hand, so that the ball seemed to come at them sometimes from the scoreboard, sometimes out of Villa’s left spike, but more often than not out of thin air about halfway to the plate. While E.A. rendered a fair approximation of Villa’s motion at BP during the Sox off-day practice at Shea Stadium, and again the next morning before the game, what he couldn’t duplicate was Villa’s release point.
VEAH STYMEES sox Moon’s headline read the morning after the Mets took game three 6–0 behind Villa’s three-hitter and Miller Jacks’s two home runs and four RBIs. But the Alien won again the next night in New York, 7–4, and Boston now had three opportunities to win the one remaining game they needed to become World Champions.
The following night at Shea the Sox started where they’d left off the night before, taking a 4–1 lead into the bottom of the fifth inning behind a young pitcher named Sullivan, who had played at Boston College and started the year at Bristol. That was as far as they got, though. Jacks homered again in the fifth with two men on, then doubled in a run in the eighth, giving the Mets a 5–4 win. Sullivan, for his part, pulled a groin muscle in the last of the eighth and was out for the rest of the Series.
Back at Fenway in game six, Spence used two journeymen minor-league pitchers who had helped the team in August and September but were no match for the Mets’ powerful lineup. Jacks, who was hitting .640 in the Series, was, if anything, inspired by the cascading boos from the Fenway Faithful each time he came to the plate. He blasted three home runs and knocked in seven runs, and the Mets won 18–2 behind Koyoto, with Villa scheduled to pitch the seventh game against the Alien, whose arm had been on ice for three days.
Having come so close that he could nearly taste the champagne (not that he liked it), the Legendary Spence appeared to have lost his last shot to win a championship and keep the Sox in Boston.